TALOS

By Asheer Malhotra and Guilherme Venere. Cisco Talos recently identified a new, ongoing campaign attributed to the Russia-linked Gamaredon APT that infects Ukrainian users with information-stealing malware. The adversary is using phishing documents containing lures related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. LNK files, PowerShell and VBScript enable initial access, while malicious binaries are deployed in the post-infection phase. We discovered the use of a custom-made information stealer implant that can exfiltrate victim files of interest and deploy additional payloads as directed by the attackers. Cisco Talos discovered Gamaredon APT activity targeting users in Ukraine with malicious LNK files distributed in RAR archives. The campaign, part of an ongoing espionage operation observed as recently as August 2022, aims to deliver information-stealing malware to Ukrainian victim machines and makes heavy use of multiple modular PowerShell and VBScript (VBS) scripts as part of the infe...

By Jon Munshaw and Asheer Malhotra.  Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing 64 vulnerabilities across the company’s hardware and software line, a sharp decline from the record number of issues Microsoft disclosed last month.  September's security update features five critical vulnerabilities, 10 fewer than were included in last month’s Patch Tuesday. There are two moderate-severity vulnerabilities in this release and a low-security issue that’s already been patched as a part of a recent Google Chromium update. The remainder is considered “important.”  The most serious vulnerability exists in several versions of Windows Server and Windows 10 that could allow an attacker to gain the ability to execute remote code (RCE) by sending a singular, specially crafted IPv6 packet to a Windows node where IPSec is enabled. CVE-2022-34718 only affects instances that have IPSec enabled. This vulnerability has a severity score of 9.8 out of 10 and is considered “more likely...

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  It seems like there’s at least one major password breach every month — if not more. Most recently, there was an incident at Plex where all users had to reset their passwords.   Many users pay for a password management service — which is something I’ve talked about a ton for Talos. But even those aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution. LastPass, one of the most popular password management services, recently suffered a breach of their own internal development environment, though as of right now, it doesn’t appear like any users’ primary passwords were compromised.  This got me curious about how people prefer to manage their passwords, so I threw up a poll on our Twitter asking our readers how they managed their passwords. Paid password management services like LastPass and 1Password were the most popular response, followed by web browser-based managers like the ones Chrome and Safari offer. Several o...

By Jung soo An, Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos has been tracking a new campaign operated by the Lazarus APT group, attributed to North Korea by the United States government. This campaign involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities in VMWare Horizon to gain an initial foothold into targeted organizations. Targeted organizations include energy providers from around the world, including those headquartered in the United States, Canada and Japan. The campaign is meant to infiltrate organizations around the world for establishing long term access and subsequently exfiltrating data of interest to the adversary's nation-state. Talos has discovered the use of two known families of malware in these intrusions — VSingle and YamaBot. Talos has also discovered the use of a recently disclosed implant we're calling "MagicRAT" in this campaign. Introduction Cisco Talos observed North Korean state-sponsored APT Lazarus Group conducting malicious activity between February...

On September's edition of the Monthly EMEA Threat Update, Hazel Burton and Martin Lee break down cyber insurance. Although many businesses and organizations will think insurance will only help them in a worst-case scenario, that worst-case scenario comes for us all eventually. Martin and Hazel discuss the benefits of having a cyber insurance policy and how it protects the policy holder when a cyber attacks strike. You can watch the full episode above or over on our YouTube page here.

By Azim Khodjibaev, Colin Grady, Paul Eubanks. Since Aug. 20, 2022, Cisco Talos has been monitoring suspected distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks resulting in intermittent downtime and outages affecting several ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) data leak sites. While the source and origin of this activity remain unknown, this appears to be a concentrated effort against RaaS leak sites to disrupt their efforts to announce and post new victim information. Actors' responses have varied, with LockBit and ALPHV implementing new measures to counteract DDoS attacks against their sites while other groups like Quantum have simply resorted to redirecting web traffic elsewhere. LockBit also appears to have co-opted this technique by advertising that they are now adding DDoS as an extortion tactic in addition to encrypting and leaking data. RaaS leak sites experience intermittent outages In late August, Talos became aware of several prominent ransomware operations, such as ALPHV (also ref...

By Jung soo An, Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos has discovered a new remote access trojan (RAT) we're calling "MagicRAT," developed and operated by the Lazarus APT group, which the U.S. government believes is a North Korean state-sponsored actor. Lazarus deployed MagicRAT after the successful exploitation of vulnerabilities in VMWare Horizon platforms. We've also found links between MagicRAT and another RAT known as "TigerRAT," disclosed and attributed to Lazarus by the Korean Internet & Security Agency (KISA) recently. TigerRAT has evolved over the past year to include new functionalities that we illustrate in this blog. Executive Summary Cisco Talos has discovered a new remote access trojan (RAT), which we are calling "MagicRAT," that we are attributing with moderate to high confidence to the Lazarus threat actor, a state-sponsored APT attributed to North Korea by the U.S. Cyber Security & Infrastructure Agency (CISA). This new RAT was found on victims ...

The India native has transitioned from a reverse-engineer hobbyist to a public speaker in just a few years   By Jon Munshaw.  Ninety percent of Asheer Malhotra’s work will never see the light of day. But it’s that 10 percent that keeps him motivated to keep looking for something new.  The Talos Outreach researcher spends most of his days looking into potential new threats. Many times, that leads to dead ends of threats that have already been discovered and blocked or don’t have any additional threads to pull on.  But eventually, the “lightbulb goes off,” as he puts it, which indicates something is a new threat the wider public needs to know about. During his time at Talos, Malhotra has spent much of his time looking into cyber attacks and state-sponsored threat actors in Asia, like the Transparent Tribe group he’s written about several times.  “At some point, I say ‘Hey, I don’t think I’ve seen this before.’ I start analyzing public disclosures, and slowly start gaining confidence and...

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Aug. 26 and Sept. 2. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise, and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive and current as of the date of publication. Additionally, please keep in mind that IOC searching is only one part of threat hunting. Spotting a single IOC does not necessarily indicate maliciousness. Detection and coverage for the following threats is subject to updates, pending additional threat or vulnerability analysis. For the most current information, please refer to your Firepower Management Center, Snort.org, or ClamAV.net. For each threat described below, this blog post only lists 2...

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  This week marks about 90 days before my wife’s due date with our first child, a baby girl. We’re both incredibly excited and nervous at the same time, and we have much to discuss, like how to lay out the nursery, what times we’ll put her down for a nap and who must be the one to get up the first time she starts crying at 2 a.m.  But the first true argument my wife and I have had about having a child is whether we should show the baby’s face on Instagram.  This child isn’t even born yet, and social media companies are probably already building out a data profile on her. I signed up for the What to Expect app so I could follow along with my wife’s pregnancy progress and learn more about what she’s going through and how the baby is developing. Already I’m getting targeted ads on the app and my Instagram for specific brands of baby food, the stroller that we’ve listed on our registry and an automati...